Laura busied herself with the language software, and the transmissions. And I focused on the reports. We busied ourselves with making the ship shipshape, and working on our various projects, Laura on the language tapes, me studying the files Jochim had given me. The story line was straight forward enough. About 2 years ago, the bandits at Trajians 7 had made contact with another vessel, from an alien race. Some stories put the number has high as 4 or 5 vessels. Communication was established, and they made a pact to work together for their mutual benefit. There were some technology exchanges, as well as raw materials and goods. Presumably also a great deal of knowledge about the technologies involved and the areas of space as yet unexplored. There had been at least a dozen similar stories reported to the commission by agents working on Morda Prima. The stories would turn up every month or so, usually in the pubs on the outpost. Until the developments at Kruger 60 in the last weeks, they were written off as the usual spacefaring fish stories, but of course any such story would have to be reported back to the commission, just for the record. First contact was considered a human race survival question, and any such tale would be noticed.
There were a few interesting details. Supposedly, the aliens were somewhat humanoid in form, with two arms and legs. Taller, and thinner, and blueish green. They were from a race from about 100 light years out, and had a power technology that was about 10 times as fast as our best ships. Weapons systems were at about a similar level of development. They were some kind of rogue group from their culture, which was far more collective than human culture. They had some kind of basic telepathy development, but you could hold it back if you wanted to. At least that was the story. It made it easy to transfer though, you could just get a direct impression of something from their minds. That was one story, anyway. Some how, the aliens and the pirates had decided to cooperate, and the pirates out at Trajians 7 had obtained a few small vessels from them, in exchange for ununpentium, that could easily do six or seven times the speed that any normal vessel could. They were small, but extremely fast. Also they had a kind of liquid metal skin that made it impossible to do any scanning of the insides of their ships, with our gear.
According to these reports, they were damn smart collectively, but very indecisive when alone. Somehow contact with others of their kind stimulated their thinking, or they had some kind of collective group thought. The only place anyone had actually met any of these creatures was out near Trajians 7; all the reports were at least second hand from pirates and smugglers that were flying back and forth from there to Morda Finsternis Prima. There was something of a regular smuggling route across the known part of the galaxy between the closed zone on the one side, at Tau Ceti, and the closed zone on the other side of the open zone where Trajians 7 was located. I took a break from the files. Outside you could see space bending as we passed through it. Long streaks of starlight passed by the window screen in front of us, glowing in blue and white, brown, yellow, and red. The ship was silent. You could hear the slight whirr of the engine as it pumped energy into the force-field that protected the ship and pushed us across the galaxy. Eight weeks. I got out of the chair and went to the galley, and made some coffee. And took a seat at the table. The ship was dark mostly, only the lights of the cockpit and the low lights above the small kitchen were lit up. Laura was still deeply engaged in her work. I don't even think she noticed me get up for the coffee.
I looked around the ship. About 25 square meters of living space for two people for 8 weeks. I finished the coffee and poured another cup, and made one for Laura, and went back to the pilot's seat. I put her coffee in the cup holder. She looked over and gave me a little smile and took off the headphones.
“Well, I think I might be making a little progress. I got some pieces of these transmissions to the point I can recognize what might be words. There isn't a lot to go on, but, well here, listen to what I have done.” She brought up the transmission loop she was working on and played it through the loudspeakers. It sounded very strange, very sing songy. Almost like the sounds whales make. Or dolphins. But different. The language sounded like some kind of very maudlin melody. First she played it through from beginning to end. Then she started breaking it into bits. “See, here is a pattern that repeats seven times in the tapes we have. I can isolate it in four different transmissions. I have at least thirty other patterns I've isolated that all match, according to the software, and I'm on track to get at least another thirty more I think shortly. The problem is there are less than 150 of these patterns here, as close as I can identify. That simply isn’t going to be enough to build any kind of dictionary. We need several hours of this stuff in order to make any break through.”
“Yea, I can see that. Problem is, where are we going to get more data?” I turned and looked at her. “And getting more data appears to be a pretty risky business.” Maybe at some point Jochim can send you something I don’t know. Next time I send him a message, I'll ask him. And you should send him your work. Someone can probably use that back in civilization somewhere. It was really silent after she played the tapes. “You know, Jochim sent us all the data that the Volga was transmitting back to Kroatzys at the time of her disappearance. There were burst transmissions every minute up until the end. Maybe you should go through their radio scans and see if they picked up much. Maybe there are some missing recordings there. They probably couldn’t Identify everything that they picked up. Perhaps you will find another transmission in that stuff.
“Not a bad idea.” She sighed. “But not right now I'm tired. That was a lot of work. How long since we made the jump?”
“Only about 8 hours. We still got a long long way to go.” I turned on the subspace radio. The usual stuff, news, some music, football etc. and of course much speculation about what was happening in the quadrant around Kruger 60, which was now off limits to all but official travel. Fortunately there weren’t any big outposts there. Some evacuations were in progress. The rest of the open area was on alert, in case anything happened. But at this point what had happened was still speculation, and the commission wasn’t saying anything conclusive, certainly not that there was a first contact possibility. It would come up occasionally in discussions, but no one in the civilian world was seriously considering it yet. I wondered how long that would last. The military activity was out of proportion to a scientific event. At some point it was going to come out, if only speculatively.
Laura got up and stretched. “I'm starving. How about deep frozen fruti de mare on fusili pasta with salads? Courtesy of Land's End fine dining.” And laughed.
“Sure why not. Are we going to go through all the good stuff the first week out? I’m not against it, just wondering.”
“Don’t know. Right now it seems like a small joy in a world of insecurity.” She looked at me. “We saw what we saw. Twice. Those people on the radio have no idea what's out there, we do. In 8 weeks the open zone as we know it could be gone. Who knows.” She turned and went to work in the galley.
“Yea I know.” I sighed again. “Hopefully that won't happen, and sitting here and worrying about it won't either. As long as the subspace radio sounds normal, we know things are basically OK. So no point in sweating it. Don't project the wreckage of the future, my father used to say. Good words.”
“Yea good words. But right now I'd feel better if we knew what we were up against.” She brought back the food and we ate in the cockpit. “Tomorrow I'll start digging into the stuff the Volga sent back. Maybe something will turn up. Alex, do you know if there are any other such unidentified transmissions around? Maybe we made contact, or have some recordings somewhere, and just don't realize it.”
“That's a possibility. Maybe somewhere, but searching for it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Basically you would have to go through every unidentified transmission humans had picked up for... Years. Maybe decades. I don’t know if there is even a catalog of such stuff. Probably somewhere, yea but not even sure where to look. Another thing to ask Jochim about.”
“So are we going right into the closed zone or are we going to stop at Tau Ceti first? Any ideas?”
“I think we are going right into the closed zone. We will pull out at the point Jochim gave us, and then re-plot our route into the closed zone. There is a small gas cloud near the jump point that is shaped like a half pipe. We can fly down that into the closed zone, and that will bring us in to deep empty space, a light year or so from Morda Prima. Then we can warp to Morda Prima, and put into the port there. Once we are there we can start investigating on the ground. These stories seem to be emanating from one watering hole in particular, some place called Phil's last stop before the stars. What a name. Well what ever. We will try there. Fortunately it's in the Morda Prima station. There should be enough people there that if we play it carefully we won't arouse suspicion. I hope.”
“How dangerous is Morda Prima?” She was down to the end of the pasta.
“Well its outside of star command. They have some kind of security there , but its mainly to keep unwanted types out. I’ve been there, twice, years ago, on undercover missions. It's pretty rough, but as long as we stick together it should be OK. But that’s important. We are going to have to stick close together. There are some really rough types there. Do you have any experience with firearms?”
She stopped eating and looked at me. “Not really. I've never owned one. I shot a 22 a few times when I was young back on earth. I don't have any real experience with any of that stuff. Are we going to have to shoot our way out of things?”
“I hope not but you never know. We should set up a simulator, and give you some practice. I can probably rig something up here in the ship. I've got a couple of hand guns, and some laser rifles. We are definitely going in armed. That isn’t a place you go without weapons. Everyone carries something there. Even the prostitutes. Death is pretty common, usually over gambling, bad debts, broken contracts and women. When we go in, I'd strongly suggest you look as non desirable as possible. Women are not very common there, and that is the cause of a lot of trouble there.”
“Great. Men... What a pain in the ass you all can be” And then she giggled.
“Yea I know. Well its like Jochim said, some traits in human nature haven’t changed much in thousands of years. Remember we are only about 60 years into real space exploration, outside of the solar system. What can I tell you?”
“Nothing, I'm rather used to it actually. And so far I've done OK taking care of myself. But then not in places where everyone is carrying weapons, and has a bad attitude, and lawlessness is the rule of the day.”
“Yea, its going to be different than just bumming around normal space stations. Those places are relatively under control. There, forget it. It's considered completely normal to solve personal problems at the end of a gun or a laser rifle out there. And no one cares or is going to stop it.”
“Great the wild west. Jochim said you wanted to live in the wild west.”
“Not really. I just don’t like too much authority breathing down my neck. I don’t trust it frankly. I saw the space commission do to many things I considered borderline.”
She had finished eating, and so had I, she got up and took the refuse to the galley, and put it in the trash compactor, and pressed the button. In a second it was vaporized.
“Well we have 8 weeks to get ready. I guess I should read up on Morda Prima as well.”
“That would be a good idea. Also everything on Trajians 7 in the computer, and this psychopath that runs the place. The dark lord of space. God you would think he could come up with a more original name don't you?”
“Maybe. Probably doesn’t care. After all he is a psychopath, and those people don’t really care about anything but themselves. Probably read too much bad science fiction as a kid.”
“Yea too much Perry Rhodan or something.”
“Who is Perry Rhodan?”
“A science fiction character from German literature. Was very popular for about 100 years from the mid 1960s until well into the 21st century.
“OK, never heard of it”
“Your basic pulp sci fi. It was fun to read, published in a number of languages. But not anything to write home about like HG Wells or Jules Verne or Philip Dick or Gardan Minostras. You could buy a little magazine each week and read what happened next.”
“Ah a serial. Cool. Was it fun to read?”
“Actually yes. I used to read a lot of it as a kid. Probably why I'm out her wandering around doing this now, if you want to know the truth.”
She smiled. “Well that’s cool. I read all kinds of adventure stories, and look where I am. Right here along side of you.”
We looked at each other. Her face was unemotional as always, but her eye had a twinkle in them. And then she looked away, and put her headphones on and went back to working on the tapes. I got out of the chair and climbed into the bunk, and turned on the reading light. And quickly fell asleep.
The next week passed much the same. We both did a lot of reading. Me on everything in the computer about Morda Finsternis Prima, rereading the files on the stories from there, and Trajians 7. She worked on the sound files, and went over the comm signals from the last transmissions of the Volga. The data was pretty extensive, several terabytes worth. It would take several weeks to go thru all of it and see what their scanners had picked up.
At this point we were both sort of in our own little worlds. Life is like that when you are locked up in a tin can with very little space and nothing but time on your hands. Traveling in space is a lot like being on a submarine. You are isolated, and stuck there, and sometimes the less you interact with others the easier it is. Whole days went by when we barely spoke to each other. Then after nine earth days out she suddenly started talking again.
“Alex, I found something. I’m sure of it. These data files from the Volga have some background noise, that after cleaning it up, appears to be transmissions much like those we already have. There are only a few more minutes of them, but they have got to be the same. I ran them through the decryption software, and the frequency distribution of the out put matches that from what we already have. They are not same as the stuff we picked up, and there are a few extra minutes that we didn’t have before.”
“OK that’s good. But I don’t suppose that’s enough to actually decode any words or anything?”
“No probably not. But I have something. I think I can identify some numbers. Coordinates maybe. Here look.”
She showed me what she was working on. She played the files on the loud speaker, and showed me the frequency distribution tables. Then she showed me how that data lined up with the movements of the ships. Yea, it looked like she had pulled up some numbers. The ships were clearly talking to one another, and were using something that looked like number designations, 1, 2, and 3.
“OK so first I got that. Then I reran the software looking for all occurrences of those sounds in all the tapes. I think I got some of it.”
She showed me the next screen of data. There were sounds and numbers from 1 to 10.
“What do you think?”
“I think you are on to something. I hope. I don't know though. We need a couple of hundred hours of this data and we would probably have something. What are we going to do with a few numbers?” I looked over at her, in her eyes. “Yes it's good work, but I fear we are going to need a lot more than that to put together anything that would allow us real comm with these aliens. Although we can definitely use the numbers to do math equations probably and that might establish some kind of communication. That is if anyone wants to communicate.”
“Yea, that would be the question.”
“Keep working on it, let's see what happens.”
The next seven weeks passed much the same. After a while we found ourselves in a routine where one of us would sleep while the other one was awake. She was deeply into the sound files, and at this point had basically memorized all of them. I was just bored, after reading up on all the information I had on the rumors,
and the places we were going. It was a massive relief when we finally reached the reentry point. We brought the ship out of warp and arrived in the middle of nowhere. We pulled out of warp, and turned on the main comm scanners. We would be getting news a week old, but that was better than what came over subspace. As soon as we did the warning beacon started pinging. There was an incoming message for us from Jochim, a video message. I pulled it up on the screen.
“Alex, this is Jochim. Before you pull into the closed zone, stop at Tau Ceti. You need to make contact with one of our agents there, a guy by the name of Paulo Vinsa. He just came out of the closed zone and can update you on things at Morda Prima. There is supposedly a supply of very highly enriched UUP coming out of there, at a high price, and that it comes from some kind of alien world. Also I have data for you from our linguists. They have made some progress on the transmissions. We have some numbers we think, and we think they are talking about coordinates or something. And they dug through everything we have on record from unknown space signals. They hit a jackpot. One of our research vessels 24 years ago was traveling in the closed zone, half way between Trajians 7 and Kruger 60. They found almost 30 hours of transmissions that were originally thought to be some kind of odd space interference, or pulsars or something. They weren’t. They are transmissions that appear to be in the same code as before. Different encryption code of course but similar in methodology. You’ll want to pick that stuff up and give it to Laura. Additionally we have some prototypes of this neutron beam weapon, and I've gotten permission to have one of these installed on your ship. They are expecting you at Johnson center. When you get there contact me. There are developments. Rumor has leaked out that we made first contact and everyone across the open zone is, shall we say, panicked. Expect some weirdness there. You shouldn't have any problems. But be alert. Some people are acting very strangely, much as scientist predicted, not everyone is being rational about all of this. So be careful. Jochim out.”
“Well Laura, it looks like we are making a detour. Johnson center. Tau Ceti. And it looks like you were right. I will be very interested to see how their work compares with yours. Get everything ready to up load, and write a quick report”
“No worries, they can have my log book, that’s as good as anything. Cool maybe we can get a decent meal before we head off to tombstone... If we have time.”
She looked at me, and for the first time I thought she looked... How do I put it... Like she was trying to communicate something to me emotionally with her body language. I smiled.
“Yea some real food would be good after being bottled up in here for that long. Lets go see whats happening at Johnson center.”
We set the new coordinates, fired the warp drive and headed to the reentry point around the base there Johnson center is a planetary base on the second planet around Tau Ceti, which is Andrea, after the first commander who visited it. It wasn’t more than a couple of hours until we pulled out at the reentry point, and made contact with Johnson center. There were six destroyers waiting at the reentry point, and it was clear they meant business to anyone who didn’t identify themselves.
We got immediate permission to land. And started the next part of the adventure.
Acknowledgments:
Many thinks to Phil Peterson for scientific consulting, Phil is my go to guy for any sci fi science, so that it at least sounds like its in the realm of possibility. And to Stephan and the crew at Nordstadtbraut for inspiration and the wireless connection. And many thanks to Rik Savering for decades of creative inspiration, advice, and the photograph the cover is based on. Looking forward to knowing you for many more years bro.
About the Author:
Christopher Rehm teaches business English in Hannover Germany. Amongst other things, he has been a US army paratrooper, rock musician, sound engineer, and design engineer at Intel. Chris writes, paints, and studies language and culture in his free time. Usually you can find him at his favorite University hangout, Nordstadtbraut, on Saturday nights.
Contact Information:
You can contact the Author at
[email protected]
or visit his blog and website at
www.christopherrehm.de
The Incident at Kruger 60, Part 1 Page 11